Failure of hard disk drives can be extremely disruptive to users. Such failures can cause loss of data and/or significant delays until a system using a failed disk can recover sufficiently to resume operation. A monitoring system can be used that gathers data which is indicative of disk health. One popular system is Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART), which can be included in computer hard disk drives and solid-state drives to detect and report various indicators of drive reliability. While standardization of SMART data has been attempted, SMART is still implemented independently by drive manufacturers, wherein each drive manufacturer can define its own set of attributes and corresponding threshold values that define normal operation. Methods for predicting disk failure using SMART data are limited to a particular manufacturer's implementation.
While there is a desire to use the output of disk monitoring systems to predict disk failure, there is a need for disk failure prediction methods that do not rely on SMART data alone or particular manufacturer implementations.